Dispelling the myth of "compassion fatigue."

David Sedaris Visits Madison, WI

The first 10K I ever ran was in Stillwater, Minnesota, with my childhood friend, Kathryn. The small entry fee was the most that either of us had ever invested in running. We were of the cotton and polyester blend, not the Quick Dry league. But as we took our place in the throng of poised runners, a rush of adrenaline set in and I was swept up in the pulse of the masses.

Kathryn caught the gleam of instinct in my eye and charged, “Don’t get heard mentality on me!”

For the most part, imagining myself as a wildebeest is enough to garner some self-control. There’s really no need to charge, headlong, through a crowd. But when I descended to the main-floor lobby of the Overture Center, last Friday evening, I recognized the vague semblance of a line forming to meet the guest of honor. It became a race, to join rank before the next person did.

I abandoned my friends and began lumbering through the crowd. From my periphery, I sensed someone advancing towards my route. But Kathryn was not there to reign me back in. I was the wildebeest that cut-off David Sedaris.

This wasn’t exactly the close encounter that I had envisioned between Mr. Sedaris and myself. We were supposed to meet as kindred writers, once I had joined the likes of humor essayists like Sloan Crosley and Kevin Kling . We would exchange laughter, while Sedaris gingerly rested his hand on my shoulder for support.

“Why don’t you come visit me when you’re on tour in France?” he would ask me.

“Oh, that would be lovely,” I’d reply. “And you must let me take you to Village Wok next time we’re both in Minneapolis. They have the best scallops with black bean sauce.”

Chums.

In the meantime, however, my almost collision with Sedaris will have to suffice. I will have to continue my admiration from the same distance of any other fan that reads his essays in the New Yorker or listens to him on NPR . He is a master of his craft – able to extract the humor from any commonplace situation in a way that is accessible to nearly any reader. He welcomes adversity and social dysfunction into his stories and demonstrates a refreshing command over these forces through his clever narrative.

While anyone can enjoy the collections of essays that he has published, there are certain bonus privileges afforded to those who attend his readings. Sedaris reads his work with its intended cadence and ever divulges in pulling entries from his journal. His experiences as a writer for the New Yorker added an extra level of entertainment value to the evening.

As an essayist, his work is subject to the magazine’s notoriously thorough fact-checking department. This publication’s reputation is contingent upon accuracy, something any good journalist is familiar with. In the case of a news article, this process might entail looking up official documents online and calling sources to verify detailed information. But in the case of Mr. Sedaris, fact checking is anything but dry.

One of Sedaris’s new essays highlighted the ridiculous nuances of his relationship with the Pimsleur audio books. He was preparing for a trip to Japan and, so he had decided to embark on a language tutorial with Pimsleur’s Japanese. He was well on his way to being able to speak Japanese in endearingly proper sound bytes.

When it came to introductions, however, Sedaris was limited by the conventional structure of family relationships. A taxi driver would ask him about his family and he would reply that he had two children – one big and one little. There was no phrase for the middle-aged homosexual who lived vicariously through his nieces and nephews, he noted.

Shortly after he had submitted this essay to the fact-checkers, he received a package from Pimsleur. Apparently, their inquiry into the vocabulary of the Pimsleur Japanese phrasebook prompted revision. On stage at the Overture Center, he played this new audio lesson for us to hear. The language instructor began deconstructing the pronunciation of “homosexual” in Japanese, just as matter-of-factly as he would for the word cat or train station. This repetitious exercise was followed by a brief reference to the more colloquial term, “gay.”